TOUR JOURNAL: Film Tour – Day 4: Denver – July 17, 2010

12:33 PM
BOB:
We screen in Denver tonight. Not much luck in the local print media. We’ll see how that affects the crowd tonight.

Currently catching up on the blog.

CHAD:
I went inside the nicest fucking church I’ve ever been in during my entire life today. Here are several videos of the occasion…

Plus, I ran into Bobby Abshire in the courtyard over by the state capitol. It was awesome, because it looked like Bobby wasn’t going to be able to show up all the way from Durango, Colorado and then suddenly, there he was. For those of you not familiar with Bobby, and especially those of you who are, here’s an article I wrote about him a couple years back…

THE LITTLE INJUN’ THAT COULD
So, I’ve got this buddy, Bobby Abshire, who turned into an Indian. It happened about ten years ago when he was still living here in Austin. I had originally met him down on the coast… he was from Brazoria County where I went to high school… and he moved up here to Austin around the same time as me and most of my high school friends. Anyway, I haven’t seen him in a while, but he recently got in a pretty bad car wreck that put him in a coma for a few weeks and broke most of his ribs and his shoulders, and all kinds of shit. I know it seems odd than an Indian would be driving a car, but trust me, you don’t know the fucking half of it. His sister was telling me about the wreck and she was trying to be optimistic saying that maybe it would convince him to settle down and take a little better care of himself, and the whole time she was saying this, I just wanted to blurt out, “You mean maybe he woke up out of the coma and didn’t think he was an Indian anymore?” Anyway, back to the transformation. Bobby had been leaning towards the native way of life for about a year (constantly talking about Indians, hating white people and America, threatening to blow up Mount Rushmore and so forth) when I watched him finally go completely fucking wild. He was living with me at the time, working at The Finish Line Car Wash out on Bee Caves Road in Westlake with several other friends, including Chuck Smith and Michael ‘Meek” Carlton. It’s important I mention their names because they witnessed the events leading up to “the incident with the deer”. You see, a doe got hit by a car out on Bee Caves Road, and its body flew into a ditch next to the car wash. It laid there for about four or five days, getting all bloated and rotten, and Bobby was obsessing over it… you know, the spirit of the deer and all that shit. He’d walk by it on the way to work from the bus stop and talk about it all day to his coworkers, then walk by it again on the way home and talk about it all night to me. Deep down inside, I knew exactly what he was going to do. I’m not sure if he waited until his day off, or just took a skinnin’ knife with him on the bus to work, but Bobby went and skinned that fucking deer after it had been dead in a ditch for the better part of a week. I mean, according to Chuck and Meek, you could smell this thing from the road when you walked by it. Bobby was down there at dusk, kneeling over the carcass, skinning away, and this Westlake mom was out for a jog and saw him in the ditch, hovering over a figure of some sort. She goes, “Is everything ok?” and Bobby looks up all crazy, holding a knife, talking about, “I couldn’t let her go to waste!” Needless to say, she thought he was talking about a person and he had to reassure her that although things might have looked bad, he was actually just down in a ditch, mutilating roadkill. He brought the pelt home and draped it over our cyclone fence to cure it, and then made a drum out of it… you know, a tom-tom. He’s been on the warpath ever since. Shortly thereafter, he got caught stealing buffalo meat from a health food store. (You probably think I made that last shit up just to be funny, don’t you?)

Anyway, Bobby’s only problem, really, is that he gets way too much pussy. I mean, I hate to admit it, but Bobby is even better at pulling wool than me. I was hoping that maybe the wreck had ugly-ed him up a little bit, so I could get a leg up on him in the arms race for pussy, but he has assured me that I had no such luck. Used to be, you’d take him to a party or a bar or whatever, and you’d just have to let him run his course, like a forest fire. He’d fuck every girl there, as the party was going on and shit, and you’d just have to sift through the remains at the end of the night looking for a little piece of ass he might have missed somehow… like a seedling in the ash. That’s why Bobby went fucking crazy, and I know how he feels. He had to turn into an Indian because he got so much pussy; he had no control in his life. He had to grab on to something, and the myth of the noble savage was just as serviceable as the gospel of Christ, or professional sports, or anything else a man can lose himself in during a crises. You at least have to give him credit for trying to better himself… and for being one of the greatest pussyhounds of his generation. I think it was the cheerleader-blonde hair that gave him the edge on everyone else.

Speaking of Bobby’s blonde hair, that was probably the oddest thing about his transformation into an Indian and subsequent hatred of the white man… the fact that he is the whitest friend I’ve ever had, genetically speaking. I look like Omar Sharif compared to this motherfucker but whenever we’d get into an argument, he’d start playing the race card… against me. He’d be like, “Oh yeah, the fucking white man… always having to be in control.” And it got to the point where shit like, “Hey Bobby, aren’t you from Angleton, Texas? Doesn’t your dad own a tow truck company? I don’t think the Indians towed cars, did they?” wouldn’t even have an effect on him… it just didn’t fit into his version of history. I remember one time five of us went up to a basketball court and got into a game of four on four so somebody had to sit out and we chose Bobby because he wouldn’t ever cover his man. He got all pissed and sat there and heckled us the whole game from underneath a tree, yelling shit like, “The white man… so big and strong! No room for me in the white man’s games.” The guys we were playing against were all white too, and you could tell it was freaking them out. They wanted to be offended, but it’s hard to get offended when you’re white (because you’re the master race) especially if the guy making fun of you is whiter than you are.

Anyway, I might be having a little bit of fun with Bobby here, but I have to give him credit at the same time… he wasn’t fucking around when he decided he was going to turn into an Indian. The last time I saw him in person, he was just about to have a kid with this girl who had three little daughters of her own and they were all living in a tee-pee outside of San Antonio. A fucking tee-pee. It was like a dream come true for him. When I talked to him on the phone a couple of days ago, I asked him if he was still living in the tee-pee and he kind of chuckled and said, “No, no tee-pee.” I was just about to congratulate him, when he continued, “I’m living in a yurt.” I had never heard anyone actually use the word “yurt” before, especially not as a serious answer to the question of what they were living in, so I said, “A yurt?” and he goes, “Yeah, it’s a cylindrical dwelling with a coned roof, like they use in Mongolia…” and I cut him off and said, “I know what a yurt is, Bobby, but are you telling me you’ve evolved from the tee-pee up into a yurt? Goddamn, you’re going to be in a longhouse before you know it.” Thing is, he’s been raising his kid as a single dad for quite a while now, living out on the plains. I know he’s still fucking all the time, so I was trying to imagine how he swings it. I got a mental image of him buttfucking some chick out in the wilderness with his kid strapped to his back in a papoose. I know that’s a terrible thing to think about, but goddamn, it made me laugh.

Anyway, I’ve got a little extra space here so let me go ahead and convey to you a terrible thing that happened with Bobby and me the last time we lived together. He had set up this little pond of sorts in his room, using a kiddie pool and some aerators. Initially, it was supposed to be for growing weed using hydroponics, but I wouldn’t let him grow weed in the house because I was already selling the fuck out of weed and everybody knows you don’t grow weed and sell weed out of the same household (at least that was my side of the argument at the time… makes less sense now). Instead, he converted the pool into a cool little habitat where he had all these fish and plants, and even a salamander of some sort living in it. It was really nice. Well, eventually we got kicked out of the house and Bobby just split, basically, and wouldn’t take the little biosphere with him. I don’t blame him… it wasn’t like there was anywhere to move the biosphere to… taking it down basically meant destroying it, along with all the little creatures that called it home. Luckily, there was a secret door in Bobby’s floor that led to the crawlspace under the house. I’d like to tell you a couple of stories about that crawlspace now, including the one I call “Judgment Day: Biosphere Armageddon”.

Basically, my buddy, Ryan Hopkins, had lived in the house before we did and he put a false bottom in the floor of the closet of that particular room that led down under the house for reasons that I’m certain were completely innocent, given his current job and station in life. When Ryan moved out, we were all moving in and Jeff Kitchens was up in town from Lake Jackson with some country boy friend of his, who we got on mushrooms for the first time in his life. I don’t remember the guy’s name, but he was totally fucking hick… he made me feel British. Anyway, the room in question was completely empty, and homeboy was walking around the house, freaking out on mushrooms. He goes into the empty room and (if you’ve ever done mushrooms or acid, you can understand this) he was overcome with the compulsion to go stand in the closet facing outwards. He stood there a little while, looking out at the room without incident, until the boards gave away from underneath him and he fell through the fucking floor. We heard him screaming and ran into the room, and all you could see was this guy’s head, shoulders, and arms coming up out of the floor. He had his fingers all dug into the wood and shit, and you could tell by looking at his face that he genuinely thought he was going to hell. Also, I’ve mentioned to you before how Scott Fondren and I got all fucked up on pills for a year and either bought or stole every piece of sports paraphernalia we could get our hands on. (You can view evidence of these atrocities by visiting the Fondren/Holt Sports Pennant Collection on display at Woody’s South.) Well, these sticker machines started popping up all over town that sold sparkly NFL helmet stickers, and we were absolutely addicted to them. We spent about a hundred dollars on them (fifty cents a pop) until Scott finally just walked into the Circle K down the street from our house and stole an entire machine. We busted it open, took out all the stickers and the coins, and dumped the body down the trap door. Anyway, I have now run out of room to type, so let me wrap this up. Basically, I ended up having to dump Bobby’s biosphere out through the closet floor, but I didn’t want any of the animals to suffer too badly in their open-air tomb, so I removed them each individually and thumped their heads first. It actually kind of worked out in the same Indian/White Man type of dichotomy that Bobby was so fond of at the time. CHAD HOLT

Here’s the video of my running into Bobby in Denver after all these years:

11:01 PM
BOB:
Many lessons to be learned. Screening in a cinema that caters primarily to college students during the summer hiatus: not the best plan. When Hell on Wheels started screening, there was noone in the room. We went and had some drinks. By the end of the flick, there were three people in there. That fucking sucked. Not even a single rep from Rocky Mountain Rollergirls (who sponsored the screening, were supposed to help cross promote and co-host the Q&A). It was lame, embarrassing and lame.

Total Badass bought in decent crowd. And everyone hung out for the Q&A. Then we had more drinks.

I peeked into the other screening rooms to judge the crowds for the other flicks. It did make me feel better to see that “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work” had only two people watching, “The Killer Inside Me” featuring Casey Affleck and Jessica Alba had only four people and the flick that the local paper “Westword” and the Onion recommended also had only four people. Basically, Total Badass was the biggest draw of the night. Fucked up.